by Megan Nolan
I still so believed in love, even then. I needed to cast myself as a slut with unshakeable proclivities to make any sense of the thing.
I thought often of how I had felt once, so strongly and clearly, that I would never hurt him. I was determined then to be nothing like Freja.
(I tried not to think, reproachfully, that perhaps his girlfriends cheated on him because of his penetrating coldness; but think it I did, and with balmy relief.)
‘He can never find out,’ I wrote, ‘beautiful Ciaran, the most beautiful man in the world. I can’t confirm his suspicions that everyone – but especially women – that everyone is essentially bad. Although I suppose I am proving him right by what I’m doing.’
My mind was splitting once more.
2
In June, a phone call from my father: he was in hospital in Waterford. There was a swelling in his throat, which was affecting his swallowing and breathing. They had taken him to do a biopsy of the tissue obstructing, but had become so concerned by his breathing that they had kept him in.
We hadn’t spoken in a few weeks. His beloved aunt had died the previous year and I had made an excuse not to go to the funeral. Things had been cordially frosty between us since then. I remember that the funeral took place during a week when my relationship with Ciaran was especially bad and I did not feel that I could leave in the middle of that. I needed to stay to keep watch over the badness, keep its embers tidy and undangerous. I preferred to stay and fight with Ciaran than to go home and be with my family.
My father couldn’t understand why. I blamed it on work, but he knew my job was perfunctory, a place to turn up late and watch the clock. The journey was so short, was the thing. The journey would only have been two hours in the car; he would have come for me.
It was difficult to lie to my father. He knew when I was lying but couldn’t bring himself to say so outright. He knew that I lied to convince myself that my messes could be overwritten. And this must have made the lies all the more jarring for him to hear, covering up things he could have no grasp on.
3
After my father’s call I arranged to take time off work to go and visit him. I sat at my desk, emailing my manager and booking tickets. I let Ciaran know that I was going, not asking him to come with me.
I felt sure that Dad was going to die. A punishment, I thought.
A punishment for ignoring my family; a punishment for needing only someone who could not see me, instead of needing the people who could.
I had loved my father so fiercely for my entire life.
Through all the squalid mess of my teenage years and beyond, during the very worst things, we had always stayed close, I had always needed him. It was only with Ciaran that I had changed, and now the punishment for that would come, the thing I had feared most all my life.
I was gripped by a sudden awareness of how terribly alone I was. My father was one of the few anchors I had to myself. When I didn’t know who I was at a given moment I could think of him and count the years back to the start. When I didn’t know who I was I could at least think of him and say, I am his. Without him, would I be forced to be this new person, this Ciaran’s-person for the rest of my life? What would hold me down any more, what would make me real? I felt that I would simply float away, that there would be nothing left of the thing I called Me before Ciaran.
I tapped my limbs and hummed tunelessly the whole journey down, buzzing with anxiety; I needed to see my father. If I saw him before anything happened then things would be OK. Just as when, years ago, Ciaran had left me I had been consumed by the feeling that things would turn out all right if I could only make him answer his phone or look me in the eye. My huge, ridiculous ego – the belief that I could stop and start the world with my presence.
When I found his room, he smiled at me and I burst into tears and ran to kneel beside him and grasp his hand saying, ‘Dad, Dad, Dad.’ He didn’t look ill, but he looked old. His eyes were as warm and bright as ever but there were new lines. His hair was all white now, and soft and thin like a baby’s. So much time had passed. So much time had passed since I had thought clearly about anything but Ciaran.
He laughed at my histrionics and patted my back in the same tender awkward way we had always showed physical affection to each other.
‘Everything’s OK,’ he said. ‘And if it’s not, we’ll take care of it and then it will be.’ He spoke slowly, painfully.
I cried, not because I didn’t believe him, but because I did.
I had so missed listening to him say this thing, this thing he had always said to me throughout my life, in a million different ways. He had always said it, and I had always listened, always believed it, no matter how terrible the thing I was enduring. But I hadn’t heard it in years now, had not cared to listen for it, and I cried because I was ashamed and for all the other things I had been deaf to, the sounds like this I would never get back. My dad was always able to save me from anything, no matter how reckless or inexplicable, he was always able to save me from anything but myself.
4
That evening, having been assured by my father and his doctor that nothing bad had actually happened yet, and that nothing at all would change overnight, I was restless and fidgety, unable to sit still or to be alone with my mind. I needed to see somebody, and went into the city to find my ex-boyfriend Reuben.
Reuben was my first love. We had met when I was fifteen and he was seventeen, fallen in a helpless, unfairly incomparable love. Until I met Ciaran, every boy and man I knew was measured against him and left badly wanting. Physically, he was the only real precursor to Ciaran.
We met at a techno night – an inordinately popular genre of music in Waterford – and were a couple a week later. He was long and angular and thin like Ciaran, but golden and dark instead of pale and blond. His eyes were a soft and clear light brown, like a cartoon woodland animal’s. He was only seventeen but seemed much older than me. He had three tattoos and was already in university, having skipped two years.
When we met I was a virgin, and nervous of sex. I had briefly dated boys before him, boys I had liked very much but who had shoved their hands down my pants or into my shirts with no warning or finesse. I had pushed them away and they had left me because of it.
Reuben and I wrote letters to each other when he was in university in Dublin and I was home, during the week. We wrote five pages of A4 refill pad, back and forth, every week. They were filled with lyrics, bits of poems, little drawings, as well as everything we were doing and feeling. It was the first time I was open in this way, outside of my diary.
I wrote poetry at the time, and won some prizes. The poems were good, sometimes because of a genuine candour, and often because I was not yet worldly enough to know to avoid plagiarism of theme and style. One poem I wrote about Reuben won a prize, and I flushed reading it aloud in a children’s library, because it was so intimate and bodily. His was the first body I knew and I loved it deeply. It was the first time I loved a man’s body, and the only time that love was not somehow dark or convoluted or ruined. We never had sex.
He was shy, reluctant or unable to name what we had together. That didn’t matter – it was as true and obvious as the fact of our bodies. On Valentine’s Day he gave me a card, in the square where we met with our friends most weekends to stand and smoke and drink coffee and swap CDs.
‘Don’t read it now,’ he said, and kissed me. I tore the envelope as soon as he was out of sight and read it hurriedly.
‘I’m excited we will both be on holidays soon,’ he wrote, ‘so that I can see you all the time. I love you.’
It was the first time a boy had said those words to me. I remember them clearly because I did something so cartoonish when I read them: I literally jumped for joy, right there in the street, in the middle of Waterford, with everyone watching.
We broke up six months later because of me. I was unhappy even then, even when I was blissfully happy with him. I was already deeply into my cutting and starving.
I knew enough to keep that hidden from him at first, and then I slowly forgot. I began to confide in him how I felt, my inability to function, what I was driven to do to myself.
It upset him. He was harsh with me – harsh for him, anyway.
‘You can’t complain about feeling bad, about being depressed, if you aren’t trying to sleep, trying to eat, trying to care about yourself.’
I found this outrageous. I was shocked that he was not impressed and cowed by my delicacy, as other boys had been. Why did he not find my frail, picturesque sadness alluring? I think now this was my first and most serious mistake – not listening to that advice. He was just a teenager, wasn’t right about everything or even most things, but he was right about that.
I was wallowing in the glamour of my sadness. I read an article in Vogue around that time which said something like: ‘This season’s looks lean towards Gothic drapery, knee socks and heavy eyeliner, showing something that every teenage girl knows: that sadness can be a kind of beauty.’
We kept on, for a while, after that, but it was over for me. I broke up with him almost a year to the day that we had got together. We saw each other a handful of times after that, after he’d moved to England, around Christmas or in summer.
There was never bad blood. We never once met up without crying and kissing. He became a sort of touchstone for me, as the rest of my life spiralled out of control. Once when I was nineteen we met and kissed and cried as usual and told each other that we loved each other.
‘Let’s stop messing around,’ I said. ‘We love each other. I made a mistake before. Let’s just be together properly.’
He agreed, and then I got the bus back to Dublin and we never spoke of it again. But it was enough, or almost, to know that he was alive and that he loved me.
5
We met in the square as it was becoming evening. He looked good, a little broader in the shoulders, had a swimmer’s body now, had joined a team when he moved to Montreal to do his fellowship.
He was tanned and had more tattoos than before, looked like somebody I would have seen and coveted in a magazine, in NME or Vice, when I was younger. He looked like someone I would have chosen as an example of the future I wanted for myself. His lean bicycle and lean self and the earring and the ease in his body.
He smiled up at me from the bench and I was amazed, as I always was when I saw him again, to feel no differently towards him than when we first met. It always felt like a sleight of hand, a bit of magic, that we both still liked each other so much, that nothing had ever ruined things for us definitively. I felt so much myself with Reuben, so rooted still.
Was it the lack of sex that did it? It was hard not to think that, like the girls in Halloween, it was only the sex that doomed me; hard not to think that I might have got on all right without it. I could have been the Final Girl.
We went to a pub and huddled in a corner, sitting close together to hear one another over the noise of the ceilidh band playing. I told him about my father, about Ciaran, told him more about the reality of Ciaran than I had anyone but my diary.
I heard myself speeding through the whole story, making a meal of all the ways that Ciaran had wronged me, skimming over my own transgressions, my willing compliance. I didn’t mention more recent developments, my thwarted rages, the sexual adventuring I was doing in my head more and more now.
I tried to point him towards how healthy I was, how I ate so well and even tried to exercise a little. I told him how I always slept a full night, not mentioning that the teenage insomnia he had known had mutated into a kind of sleeping sickness, that I could sleep for twelve or more hours now, and would if left alone.
It was late and we were drunk, holding hands.
‘This is so you,’ Reuben said.
‘What is?’
‘You always think your pain is the most painful. You always think it’s uniquely awful.’
I stared back at him mutely (even then aware of how my face became prettier in vacancy, even then parting my lips and sweetly widening my eyes in surprise).
He laughed. ‘It’s fine. I’m not giving out. I know you; I know this is what you’re like. It’s just – you’ve barely asked about me. You have no idea what’s going on in my life. You never really have.’
‘Tell me,’ I said, face moving closer.
‘No! I’m not going to list all the things wrong with my life so you can take them in and then compare them to yourself.’
It was bad, what he was saying, and true, but he was smiling as well.
‘I don’t know how you get away with it,’ he said, still smiling and shaking his head, and then I kissed him.
2019, Athens
I see beautiful teenage boys now and my heart bends at their broad shoulders and neat torsos, the golden triangle, at their tanned long calves and miraculous forearms. I hunger in their direction just like the men I disdain for doing the same to girls. I can’t help viewing these boys in the same way I did when I was a teenager, I see the ones who would have obsessed me, and guess at which ones would have felt the same about me.
Strange to know you’ll never again be with the kind of person who made you love first, their imprint inescapable. There are just a few portals backward, if you don’t plan to become predatory – the boys you loved back then, grown now, but the teenager still visible within, to you at least. With them and only them, you can feel yourself as rapt and opened up and simple as you once were, both of you as beautiful as children to each other.
Nobody who loves me from now on will ever know, really know, really believe, that I was a beautiful child once.
6
I stayed at home for three more nights after the biopsy had been taken. I googled my father’s symptoms relentlessly, and found a million people saying it was nothing and another million saying it was terminal.
When I slept with Reuben in his old room it was like sleeping with a wonderful ghost. I touched him in places I had forgotten and then remembered them in an instant. I touched new parts of him, places I hadn’t when we were young but which still felt familiar.
At first I froze when he touched me, afraid I wasn’t as lithe and slight as I had been when we’d known each other, but under his hands my body felt reversed, pliable and unused again. I felt virginal, felt that we could correct a decade of wrongs together.
He trailed his hands over my ribs and stomach and I didn’t breathe in, as I instinctively did still with Ciaran to make myself thinner.
Nothing was dramatic. It was soft and easy. It was almost funny: we both laughed. It was like the feeling of talking late at night after the light had been turned off and trying not to let your laughter run away with you.
It was amazing how different it was to sleeping with Ciaran. Part of what had made me addicted to Ciaran’s body and to having sex with him was the quality of my need. It was acute, desperate, anguished. It was trying to win an argument.
It wanted him to surrender to me, either to become totally loving, totally mine, or to play dominant in an overt and quantifiable way. But he just existed, passive and removed, fucking me in a way that reminded me of necessary tasks, of the way he ate – not without any pleasure, but even so, with a heavy sense of function. I could never get any closer to him, could never satisfy myself. And that made me want him more for years, had made me wild with violent need.
Now, without it, I could feel the silliness of sex for the first time in forever. It wasn’t cinematic or beautiful. I could feel my body once more and it did not feel unfinished, as it always did with Ciaran. It did not feel like something that had been forgotten about in the middle of creation, did not feel like a hasty sketch without the proper lines put in. It didn’t feel in wait.
I felt it slide, slick and friendly, against Reuben’s and the flesh didn’t seem spare but instead put to good use. I filled his hands, made him happy. I was surprised by my voracity, surprised at all the things I wanted to do to him and the shamelessness with which I asked for his permission to do
them. He was beautiful, and he was my friend, and I wanted him so much, and he was not Ciaran.
I felt no guilt that night.
We woke the next morning, his breath was sweet and milky, even first thing, like a kid’s. We grinned at one another sheepishly and kissed and stretched about yawning in bed, hoping his parents had left the house. I didn’t try to say this time that we were in love and should be together.
We didn’t need to talk about anything. It was perfect – he was going back to Montreal, and I had my own foreign land to return to. I was keeping the secret of Ciaran from myself, storing him with demented precision just outside my active thoughts. I could feel him there, waiting to erupt and ruin the calm glow of my morning with Reuben, but I kept him at bay.
7
When I left Reuben’s house, walking to the hospital to say goodbye to my father, a surge of adrenalin crested through me.
I walked faster and harder and concentrated on my father, what I wanted to ask his doctor, trying to use all the panic up on that. Near the Ardkeen Road I broke into a ragged jog – how Ciaran would have rolled his eyes to see me gasp, my slobby technique! – and began to shake my head violently from side to side when an intrusive thought came, the idea of me putting my key in the door, of him looking at me, the idea of him knowing what I had done, him smelling it on me even without a sense of smell, knowing in an instant that I was disgusting, that he had been right all along to think me unworthy of him.
I shook my head, rattling my brain, blurring my vision, and when that didn’t work I bent down on the side of the motorway and closed my eyes and pressed my thumbs into the recesses of the sockets, and drove my knuckles into my temples hard, letting me see only flashing blobs of white and dark, flooding my vision, saturating me entirely.